Stuntdubl Business Search Marketing Consulting

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Why are you always retrofitting and re-optimizing? Your CEO (or other decision maker) didn’t ask the right questions. You need to know how to build and promote a website from the ground up to be successful. Picture your perfect web presence. Visualize web 2.0 Zen. Now work backwards and apply these principles to your website among various time, budget, legacy technology, and personal ego obstacles of varying degrees in the way of your quest towards website enlightement. Welcome to the world of SEO.

The ASIDIC conference was a completely new experience for me. It gave me a chance to get outside my comfort zone in the world of search and try to soak up some of the cutting edge information in an entirely new field. The conference gave off a bit of the same vibe that the music industry must have felt shortly after the reign of Napster began. MP3’s were “good enough”, and so is Google in many instances. I’m sure premium content will make out just fine, but the shifts in distribution and consumption within the marketplace has caused a chasm that many will fall into. It will also create a lot of opportunity, as folks in the music industry have established with the increase of music consumption. The experience of focusing on distribution models was quite eye opening, and inspired many ideas that will definitely come in handy for future ventures.

**Editor Notes
Karl Ribas is currently the Project Manager over at All Web Promotion, and on the side runs his own search engine marketing Blog and consultant website. I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with Karl back and forth online, and finally got to meet him (along with CK aka Kid Disco) at SES in San Jose a few weeks ago. Karl has put together a nice list of how to’s for finding a good SEO consultant.

1. Highly intelligent PPC automation tools and arbitrageurs
2. Age factors impacting trust score
3. Ad agencies catching on to SEO
4. User data validation for trust score
5. Saavy affiliates with established sites that don’t like competition
6. SE’s shifting of the content revenue model
7. Diminishing conversion rates for link requests
8. Just like the “real world” $$$$$$ will again = trust
9. Ad agencies playing ball with SEO’s
10. The day Aaron retires from building free tools
11. Leveling of information between buyers and sellers

I thought it was worth mentioning that I’ve recently “officially” decided to make a more long-term committment to doing independent consulting work. For now, I’ll be focusing mainly on doing site audits and developing strategies for people looking to do their own SEM work, or looking to bring a team of search engine marketers in-house.

A good SEO is both a geek and a suit, and is able to speak the language of both worlds. Providing SEO services without understanding both business and techie principles is the equivalent of trying to teach english to spanish children without knowing both languages and cultural mores of both fluently.

I had a recent e-mail conversation that I felt was worth publishing publicly (with permission of course), due to the frequency I receive this type of question. Link development is highly important, and quality link development is a valuable skill. That being said, it is still only a part of the overall process of getting a website top rankings. It is often among the most difficult part of ranking a website high because it doesn’t get planned for from the start of the project and has to be retrofitted later. Getting the links you need for the rankings you want entails understanding the value involved from the publisher’s side, and providing adequate incentives for them to link to you (cool stuff, good content, bartering, cash, etc.). Unfortunately, this is a pretty difficult thing to put a budget proposal in for unless you really understand the true value of the different types of links, and what they mean to the bottom line.